Hacker News Reader

Comment by exolymph | Hacker News Reader

Owning is just so much less convenient than renting access. I vastly prefer the experience of using Spotify and Netflix to the experience of maintaining my own music and media collections.

View on HN

While I agree, renting access often comes with the trade-off of losing control of your content. Netflix's content licensing agreements are finite, and your favorite movie or show could be gone next week. When you own the files, you own them for however long you desire.

True, there are always tradeoffs. This particular tradeoff doesn't bother me because I can always get a copy of a particular file if I need to, e.g. if Netflix pulls down a show I like.

For music at least, you can get the best of both worlds with Google Music. Any songs you purchase, you own. You can download them, back them up, migrate them to a different service, whatever. For songs you don't own, you can still stream them and save them offline as long as you're subscribed.

AFAIK no real equivalent to this exists in the video streaming world yet. Plex is starting to come close though: https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/26/plex-cloud-online-server...

You can download them TWICE. I guess after that you smell like a pirate.

I understand that people have different priorities, but as others already mentioned licensing deals end and you might find yourself without access to countless favorite albums at some point, despite having paid Spotify & Co. for years. And that's not even discussing the huge amount of obscure, leftfield music and rare stuff that won't be available on any streaming platform, ever. For me, as a music enthusiast and collector, the selection on streaming platforms is way too limited. The same applies to films and shows - there the situation is even worse. Netflix selection is very, very poor and of course they know it, which explains the heavy focus on original and exclusive content.

This is what everybody thinks the first few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com